The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (23 page)

I’m seventy years old actually, and I’ve retired. I was in the car game for forty-five years but, oh, back a while now, I had a bit of a heart turn and I was in Chinchilla Hospital. Chinchilla’s west of Brisbane, between Dalby and Roma. Anyway, after four days, the Flying Doctors came out and they flew me to Brisbane. So really, I just wanted to say an extra thank you to the Royal Flying Doctor Service, you know, not only for how they helped me but, for all us bush people, especially those that live out in the real remote areas. They’d be done without them.

So that’s all I was going to say and then I was going to tell you a little story about my dad. Dad used to be a drover. Out through the west of Queensland he was commonly known as ‘Flash Jack McIntyre’. You might’ve heard of him. I used to go out droving with him too, right out Charleville way, all around throughout that district: Tambo, Augathella, Cunnamulla, Eulo and all them places. One of my brothers also used to be out that way. He was a Senior Sergeant of Police: Neil McIntyre.

But long before he joined the police force, Neil and my other brother, Duncan, and myself — my name’s Noel — we all done a stint or three out the west, droving with Dad and other fellers. It was an experience, I can tell you. As a matter of fact, do you know Howard Hobbs? From memory he’s the Local Member for Maranoa. Well, we used to do a lot of droving for his
father. I think his name was also Howard Hobbs, and they lived at Tambo.

Oh, there’s stacks of stories I could tell. It just goes on and on. But see, if someone asked me to go camping today, I’d say, ‘No thank you, very much.’ Because, you know, when you were out droving, it was a tough old life. You hardly saw anyone and you didn’t eat very well and you only had a wash every time you got to a creek or a bore drain. Don’t get me wrong, it was good experience but it certainly made me realise the good things in life.

Anyhow, see, Dad was out droving one time and, back in those days, the telephone lines they had were only bush telephone lines. You know, they were just a length of old wire cable that ran between properties and properties, and they were only strung up loosely between one old rickety wooden pole to another or, if they could find a tree, it was hung from one tree to another tree, that sort of thing; pretty rough. Anyhow, Dad used to hang a leading-line between the horse he was riding and the pack-saddle horse. So he was going along, nice and steady, when a telephone line got caught in the pack-saddle and the packhorse shied and it threw the pack-saddle back and it hit Dad fair on the mouth. Then, as Dad got hit, he flinched and his spurs dug into his horse and it leaped and bolted off. And that’s how Dad ended up in Charleville Hospital, where he had quite a lot of stitches in his mouth and all that.

Now, what you’ve got to understand is that this was fifty odd years ago and, back then, there were lots of people who were living out in those real remote places who’d never even been into a big town. Like, they were
born in the bush and that’s where they stayed for the whole of their lives, out in the bush.

Anyhow, the nursing people in at the Charleville Hospital were telling Dad about this old-timer who’d worked out on a remote station property. He’d never been out of the bush so he’d most certainly never seen a town as big as Charleville, which meant it was a dead cert that he’d never been in a hospital before. Anyhow, he’d been pretty badly bunged up. I’m not real sure just why now. It might’ve even been a riding accident or something. But the thing was that it happened away out in one of the real remote areas and the Flying Doctors had to go out and bring him back into Charleville for treatment.

Well, this old-timer arrived at Charleville Hospital — as I said he was pretty bunged up — and the nurses said, ‘We’re going to have to take you for X-rays.’

Now, of course, this old-timer didn’t have a clue what an X-ray was so he started to get real worried. ‘Will it hurt?’ he asked.

‘No,’ they said, ‘You won’t even know you’ve had one.’

But that didn’t seem to ease this old-timer’s worries. For starters, he was a bit suspicious about putting all his trust in these strange, city-type people. To his liking they talked too fast and, anyway, you’d have to be mad to want to live in a big place like Charleville. So he was really nervy. Then by the time they got him into a wheelchair, he was even more nervy. He’d never been in one of those neither. As they were wheeling him down the corridor, he was so bad that he was sweating.

By the time they pressed the button for the lift he was in a real panic. Then, while they were standing
around, waiting for the lift to come, they noticed that the old-timer’s knuckles had gone white from gripping so hard onto the wheelchair.

‘It’ll all be over very soon, sir,’ they said, trying to reassure the old-timer.

So the lift arrived and they rolled this old feller into the lift and they pressed the button to take the lift to the second floor of the hospital, which was where the X-ray Department was. Then just as they wheeled him out of the lift on the second floor, the old-timer let go a big sigh.

‘Are you alright, Mr so-and-so?’ they asked.

‘Well, you were right,’ he replied. ‘Isn’t it bloody marvellous how they do X-rays, eh? That didn’t even hurt a bit.’

And Dad was laughing his head off about this because, you know, Dad had lived. He’d been down to Brisbane and all those places, where they’ve got lifts and escalators and all that. So he’d been around, done a thing or two, as they say. But, you know, back fifty years or so a lot of those old-timers away out in the backblocks of Queensland, they’d never seen a lift, and there was this old-timer, who’d never been out of the bush, well, he thought that the lift was an X-ray machine, didn’t he.

My name’s Micky Hunter. I’m from out at Hillston, in the central west of New South Wales, just west of Griffith. I’m part Italian, part Aboriginal so, mate, that’s why I tell everyone I’m from the ‘Wog-Abo Tribe’. But I worked a long time as a stockman-ringer, all over the place, and a lot of that ringer stuff is what I’m writing in a book. I’m calling it ‘Not Another Bloody Book’ and it’s stories of the incidents and the old fellers I met along me life and stuff like that.

Have you heard of Sir Sidney Kidman? Well, mate, Sir Sid is my top, number one, best Aussie. His fairness and everything is just one great thing about him and another is that the man never swore or drank or smoked cigarettes. But, yeah, I did all that. I still do but I don’t drink now, but I did all that stuff. So there you go. But with my book, I’ve been working on it for a long while now, and talking to people all about it, and yeah, it’s a good idea but I can’t find a structure at all, you know.

Anyhow, here’s a Flying Doctor story that’s going to be in my book. It’s probably one of the best of them really because it’s fair dinkum. It really happened. Because, just between you and me, there’s a lot of make-believe stories in my book so there’s a few in there that are a bit ‘stretchy’, if you catch my drift. But this one’s a true one, and it’s about how a Flying Doctor helped a young ringer when his horse went over on him up in the Normanton area, in the north-west of Queensland.

What happened was that there was different mobs of us ringers, all over the place, mustering up there in the claypan country, and it happened around one of the mustering yards. I couldn’t tell you the name of the property offhand because it was a long time ago now, mate, back in the mid-60s, before the boys went to ’Nam (Vietnam). Anyhow, we’d been mustering, yeah, and in our mob there was fifteen of us ringers and there was four or five thousand cattle.

See, with the mustering, you bring the cattle into the yard and you do various different things with them. Most of them was scrubbers that, you know, you hadn’t seen for eighteen months or two years or something like that. So we’d brand them, de-horn them and deknacker them. There was just five of us blokes who were in our contract team and the other ten we employed was mostly good Aboriginal fellas from around the country. Up there we sort of knew everyone around the place. It’s a brotherhood, you know, all us ringers are, yeah.

Anyhow, our boss brought the plane down and he said he’d just heard over the radio that there’d been an accident over with another mustering team, a couple of hundred kilometres away. Now you know how you sort out strays? Well some men do it with vehicles and it’s like a game, you know, they bellow and holler and they get the cattle extremely excited so when one takes off, one of the ‘Yahoo-ringers’ goes and chases it on a horse. And a boy was chasing some strays, like I said, and his horse went over on him and he was squashed by his beast.

So then we was listening to all what was going on over the boss’s aeroplane radio. A young doctor was already there with the injured boy. He might’ve already
been in the area doing clinics or something, so he touched down there pretty quick to check the boy out. Then he reported into Head Office, you know, because he didn’t know what to do and he wanted to talk to an expert doctor.

Now, I’m not sure where he rung into but it might’ve been Cloncurry or one of them bigger Flying Doctor bases. And we could hear them talking through the airwaves to each other, so we could hear all what was going on, yeah, and it wasn’t too good. From what the young doctor was telling the expert doctor, the young ringer, who’d got trampled on, well, he had real bad head injuries so there was a lot of pressure on the brain and it looked like he was going to die.

Well, the expert told the young doctor that the first thing he had to do was to try and relieve the pressure on the ringer’s head. But then the young doctor said that he didn’t know how to do that. Maybe he was either a young first-timer or maybe he hadn’t done a lot, I don’t know. Anyway, the expert doctor asked the young doctor if there was one of them home electric drills handy. You know, one of them Black ’n’ Decker-type drills, the same as we was all using in the workshops. So it was one of those, and the expert doctor wanted a steel bit put into it. Yeah, a steel bit.

So they found an electric drill and the young doctor got someone to put the drill bit into the drill because he didn’t know how to do that neither. Then after they done that, the expert started telling the young doctor how to operate on this young ringer: like, where to drill a hole in the boy’s head to relieve the pressure.

And we could hear it all because, see, we was all standing around the boss’s plane listening to the
outcome of this young ringer being squashed by the horse. And we even heard the sound of the drill, because there was a big whirring sound when he first started it up and then, when the drill was going into the boy’s head, the whirring sound slowed right down. And he done it. The young doctor done it. He drilled into this boy’s head. I don’t know what come out of the head, whether it was blood or whatever it was, but the young doctor relieved the pressure alright because this young fella, they flew him out in an emergency plane and apparently everything turned out alright. So there you go.

In 1990 my wife and I and a small group of friends made plans to travel down the Canning Stock Route. There were four cars, three Land Rovers of varying vintages and us, with our Hilux. For my wife and I it was literally the start of five months travelling, which was fantastic. Actually, it was brilliant.

One of the blokes who was probably the key to putting the trip together was my mate, Murray. Murray’s no longer with us I’m afraid but, to give you some idea as to what sort of character he was, some years ago Murray decided to tackle the Simpson Desert. And where everyone else drives it — and Murray had already driven it about five times — this time he decided to walk it. Yes, walk it. So he put together a bunch of people with camels and followed the route of Madigan the explorer across the Simpson.

One of the other guys who went with us on the Canning trip was a feller called Vic Jaeger. Vic’s Member Number One of the Victorian Land Rover Owners’ Club and what Vic doesn’t know about four-wheel drives and travelling, probably isn’t worth knowing. Now, Murray was the best mechanic I knew and he told me that Vic was the best mechanic he’d ever known. That’s how good Vic was, so he was a handy sort of person to have along on a trip like that.

Anyway, my wife and I stayed back in Melbourne a little longer than the others because they wanted to take their time in getting to our rendezvous point
of Halls Creek. Then my wife and I sprinted from Melbourne to Halls Creek, doing the trip in five days, which included having to fix a car problem along the way. When we got to Halls Creek we ended up waiting for three days before Murray, Vic and the others arrived. They got there a bit late.

Then we all headed off from Halls Creek and instead of going down the usual way, we thought we’d go off the main stock route. The track, if you could even describe it as that, proved to have been so little travelled that, when we got to one particular spot, a 20-foot tall sand dune had literally covered the track. There were no wheel tracks over it, either. Nothing. That’s how much out of the way we were at that point. I’d even go as far as to say that it was the most remote place I’d ever been in, in my whole life.

So, it took a bit of work for us to get our vehicles up and over this dune. Then, when we eventually got over, you wouldn’t believe it, there, just on the other side of the dune, waiting to come up, was a feller in a Nissan Patrol, with his wife and two kids. Now we didn’t expect to see anyone away out there, let alone a feller driving by himself with his wife and kids.

Given that we were in such a desolate place and we were there with four beautifully equipped cars, our instant thought was, ‘This feller must be nuts to be out here by himself.’

But as it happened, that wasn’t actually the case because the feller told us that he and his family had left his travelling companions that morning, after there’d been an accident and the RFDS had come to the rescue. Apparently this feller, his family and another couple and their children had been travelling
together. They’d stopped overnight on a claypan, a bit further back down the track, and a little nine-year-old girl from the other family climbed the only tree out on this claypan. Then, as little girls sometimes do, she fell out of the tree and, unfortunately, when she landed she suffered a fracture of one thigh. So it was a fairly serious situation that they then found themselves in.

Luckily, they were well equipped with both their vehicles having radios and so forth. So they got on to the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the RFDS gave them directions to a disused airstrip, which was relatively close to where the young girl had fallen out of the tree. Then, after they’d arrived at the strip, the RFDS had asked them to call back and give them an estimate of the condition of the strip so they could get some idea as to the possibilities of landing an aeroplane.

So they did just that. These two families drove out to the disused strip and had a look and, as anyone would do in an emergency like that, they called the RFDS back and told them that the strip would be safe enough for an aeroplane to land on. After they’d made the call, the two families then proceeded to get stuck in and clear the shrubbery and what-have-you off the strip, the best they could. When that was completed, they set up a smudge fire so that the pilot could gauge the wind direction when he came in to land. Then they waited.

While all this was going on, the RFDS pilot had taken off from Derby — I think it was Derby — in a King Air, with a doctor and nurse on board. And when they arrived, the pilot did a series of low overflights to check the condition of the strip for himself, before deciding whether it was
safe to land or not. He then deemed it an emergency and he put the King Air down on this disused, freshly cleared strip. That, in itself, was an extraordinary effort because the King Air is a heavy plane and, what’s more, it needs about 800 metres to take off, which was another concern they were yet to face.

Anyway, all went well and the injured girl was picked up and was, at the time we met the feller, on her way to a hospital in Perth in the King Air and her parents had parted from the family in the Nissan Patrol to head off for the closest town, which was Newman. From there, their plan was to fly down to Perth and meet up with their daughter.

So that was what the feller in his Nissan Patrol told us, when we met at the dune.

But when I got to thinking about it all, I was just blown away by the logistics of that particular RFDS operation, on many counts. Firstly, the pilot, when he arrived at that roughly cleared airstrip, way out in the middle of nowhere, he had to make an instant assessment of its condition, and he had to get it absolutely right. If he got it wrong, it’d spell disaster for everyone. Of course, he’d be fully aware that these people would’ve told him that this airstrip was safe enough to put the aeroplane down, even if it wasn’t, because their assessment was that of desperate parents with a badly injured child. They’d just want somebody there who could save their child. Secondly, the pilot would know that the decision he was about to make was not only about the life of a little girl but that he was also responsible for $6 million worth of aeroplane along with the lives of the doctor and the nurse he’s got on board.

Also, of course, the doctor and the nurse have to place their absolute faith in the pilot’s assessment of the situation. Even if they’re terrified about what he’s about to do, all they can do is sit there. If you talk to some of the nurses, and I have asked this question, ‘Don’t you get scared when you go out on some of these tricky retrievals?’

They’ll tell you that, ‘Yeah, there are times when we’re terrified, but we have complete confidence in the judgment of the pilots and the decisions they make.’

So there was all that to be taken into consideration before they even landed the King Air. But then, what also astounded me, in that situation, was the absolute remoteness of where the retrieval had taken place. We’d travelled south for a week, without seeing a soul, to reach that 20-foot dune along the Canning Stock Route and the other two families had travelled north for a week, without seeing anyone. Just to give you some idea, the closest town was Newman, which was a good three or four days’ drive away — I repeat days — and when you have a little girl with a fractured femur, any sort of delay in getting treatment might mean she could suffer permanent damage or lose a leg or, possibly, even die.

And it was only thanks to the professionalism and the courage of the RFDS crew that, on the same day this little girl fell out of the tree, they flew out there and plucked her out of the most isolated place I’d ever been in my life and had delivered her to a major hospital in Perth. So quite possibly a little girl’s life was saved. Well, her leg was saved and that’s the next most important thing.

Now, this’s going to sound terribly naive, I know, but for me, the pilots, the doctors and the nurses of
the Royal Flying Doctor Service are my heroes because at any given time they display that same courage and competence as they did in that situation with the little girl. On a daily basis they put their lives on the line for people who are complete strangers to them. They don’t care who these people are, or what their nationality is, or what religion they are. And it doesn’t matter to those pilots, doctors and nurses how those very same people probably wouldn’t take a similar risk for them. In fact, they wouldn’t even realise the risk. What’s more, the RFDS do it for free. How good is that?